Cuban on Internet Video: It's Not TV

Joseph Laszlo | July 14, 2006, 03:05 PM

Mark Cuban has been saying for some time now that Internet video is not the same as TV. This seems so obvious that it wouldn't merit me chiming in to agree, unless I was going to note the small irony of the statement coming from a founder of a company called broadcast.com.

But Mark's been taking a lot of flak for this seemingly straightforward observation, to the point where he's published a long, well-argued screed on Blog Maverick defining and defending his position.

So, I will chime in and say, yep, he's right. The benchmarks for a successful Internet video initiative are fundamentally different than TV metrics, and they're gonna be for a long time...maybe forever. That's NOT to say that Internet video's not important, and won't succeed and draw ever larger audiences. But it's still not TV.

Take American Idol. Love it or loathe it, it's a hit. The premiere of the current season drew 35m viewers. That's broadcast, baby, and the most successful online videos don't/can't hold a candle to it.

Over 4 days, the CBS March Madness webcast drew 4m viewers. More importantly, it hit a peak of 268,000 simultaneous viewers. This compares to AOL's Live8's 175,000 simultaneous viewers, and the space shuttle Discovery launch with 335,000 simultaneous viewers.

These are the biggest hits in online video, and we're talking audiences that are two orders of magnitude smaller, and for video that's not even full screen SD quality, much less HD.

If that's the case, is Internet video at all a threat to traditional video? Absolutely it is. People are watching more and more, and given a limited time to watch anything in a day, that will sooner or later eat into some TV viewing. We're looking increasingly closely at consumer habits and preferences around video to identify just where that substitution is most likely...stay tuned.